they produced the Cardinal of Lorraine in his robes of function, ordering general slaughter.  Was this spectacle intended to make the Parisians abhor persecution and loathe the effusion of blood?  No:  it was to teach them to persecute their own pastors; it was to excite them, by raising a disgust and horror of their clergy, to an alacrity in hunting down to destruction an order which, if it ought to exist at all, ought to exist not only in safety, but in reverence.  It was to stimulate their cannibal appetites (which one would think had been gorged sufficiently) by variety and seasoning,—­and to quicken them to an alertness in new murders and massacres, if it should suit the purpose of the Guises of the day.  An Assembly in which sat a multitude of priests and prelates was obliged to suffer this indignity at its door.  The author was not sent to the galleys, nor the players to the house of correction.  Not long after this exhibition, those players came forward to the Assembly to claim the rites of that very religion which they had dared to expose, and to show their prostituted faces in the senate, whilst the Archbishop of Paris, whose function was known to his people only by his prayers and benedictions, and his wealth only by alms, is forced to abandon his house, and to fly from his flock, (as from ravenous wolves,) because, truly, in the sixteenth century, the Cardinal of Lorraine was a rebel and a murderer.[113]

Such is the effect of the perversion of history by those who, for the same nefarious purposes, have perverted every other part of learning.  But those who will stand upon that elevation of reason which places centuries under our eye and brings things to the true point of comparison, which obscures little names and effaces the colors of little parties, and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral quality of human actions, will say to the teachers of the Palais Royal,—­The Cardinal of Lorraine was the murderer of the sixteenth century; you have the glory of being the murderers in the eighteenth; and this is the only difference between you.  But history in the nineteenth century, better understood and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civilized posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barbarous ages.  It will teach future priests and magistrates not to retaliate upon the speculative and inactive atheists of future times the enormities committed by the present practical zealots and furious fanatics of that wretched error, which, in its quiescent state, is more than punished, whenever it is embraced.  It will teach posterity not to make war upon either religion or philosophy for the abuse which the hypocrites of both have made of the two most valuable blessings conferred upon us by the bounty of the universal Patron, who in all things eminently favors and protects the race of man.